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mHealth Investment Sees a Drop at the End of 2012 Fiscal Year

As the healthcare industry adapts to the technology of the 21st century, we are seeing mobile health care spending and investing go through some real ups and downs. Despite the overall numbers increasing year over year, venture capital investments on mobile healthcare actually went down in the third and fourth quarter of 2012. What does this mean for the long term? It doesn’t seem quite clear yet, but spending in general appears to be hitting a plateau in the short term.

A new report by the Mobile Health Market News shows that the mHealth sector saw total venture capital investments hit $907.7 million in 2012, but the investments in the third and fourth quarter were quite a bit lower than they were in the first two quarters.

What stood out even more is that while investments decreased from the second to the third quarter, those investments decreased even more when comparing the third quarter to the fourth. In 2012’s fourth quarter, there was a total of $200.7 million invested, which was a six percent decrease from the third quarter.

Mobile healthcare is playing a rather large part in where the investments are going in general. Insight Venture Partner's $40 million Series A financing to Kinsser Software was one of the biggest mobile healthcare investments of the year. Qualcomm laid out a nice chunk of change as well, with its $25.5 million investment in the mobile health company Telcare.

In the fourth quarter of 2012, information technology in the mHealth sector brought in the most investment money. In quarter four, 45 percent of the investments went to this sector. Coming in at a close second was healthcare monitoring. In total, the sector brought in about 31 percent of total investments in the fourth quarter and 21 percent of total investments for the year.